By going off the gold standard, we abstracted away from the real economy, and moved further away from reality. We measure productivity through GDP, but this increases when we print money, so it isn’t really a useful measurement, similar to a scale always telling you, you’re at your desired weight.

Trying to process this video. https://youtu.be/BHu5h26c4nc
In it, he says a better measure would be measuring fertility rate or the weight of the products produced.

Similar to this, we use proof of memory as proof of understanding, but you can memorize a poem in another language and understand nothing.

Interestingly, Newton established the gold standard after a decade of dabbling in alchemy, failing to transmute other material into gold.

Abstractions are like a lossy compression algorithm in that there are trade offs. 

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web